iPhone 5 Fingerprint Scans Pave Way to Biometric Future

The consumerist world is buzzing this week with news that Apple’s new iPhone 5S will include a creepy fingerprint scan to unlock the phone and facilitate the ‘secure’ purchase of apps and other products.

That’s right, the unsettling development of biometric identification is moving forward in lockstep with the cashless control grid on one of the most widely popular communications technologies in history, all in the wake of fallout over the extent of NSA surveillance programs that monitor and collect data from the communications of ordinary Americans.

Further, the iPhone 5S will ‘only’ store a data log identifying your fingerprint, and not a digital image of the actual fingerprint images, though, vulnerabilities clearly still exist.

“Fingerprints are not fool-proof and can be duplicated and as the usage of this technology increases, we can expect that duplication technology will improve as well.” Mark Rogers, of the firm Lookout, told the Daily Mail.

At this point, users should engage this latest tech update with extreme caution, though droves of fanatical first wave purchasers seems more likely.

This point is reiterated by defenders of the new iPhone, as in the Washington Post’s Everyone Calm Down About the iPhone’s fingerprint scanner. But can these assurances really be trusted? (Many government officials are still denying that the NSA is spying on average Americans.) And should we really be naive enough to engage this system at every turn with increasing amounts of extremely personal information?

Critics have warned that thieves have already resorted to dismembering victims to use their body parts to gain access to protected and encrypted areas, and that such shocking events would occur with widespread use of the iPhone 5. It’s the kind of biometric backlash long-since featured in Hollywood films like Mission: Impossible or Minority Report, where the heroes borrow eyeballs and fingers to trick checkpoint scanners. Engineers have fought back by developing “life check” software that measures for pulse and perspiration in order to verify that the finger is on a living being. But those technologies can be defeated too, and immerse the user even more fully into the bioscanning environment – and philosophically intertwine biological life and technology even further, while increasing control.

These an other developments, like Homeland Security’s Trusted Traveler program, make clear that the powers that be intend for the emerging future to be “secured” and based around authenticated and verified persons, places, things and transactions, backed up and controlled by biometric data.

Eugenics laws and closely related public health policies were passed in the United States, as well as the UK, later spreading to Nazi Germany and other Western nations. However, the largely elitist philosophy of dominance lost credibility with the fall and exposure of Hitler’s regime. Instead, it reemerged in the post-war world under code names like “population control” and in conjunction with environmental pretexts calling for restrictions on resource, energy & land use, as well as “family planning” and other softly-termed nudges towards outright restrictions like China’s one child policy.

Today’s neo-eugenics – where scientists are using techniques of artificial reproduction, genetic screening and genetic modification – is already ideologically married to a system that is increasingly using “smart” data to track and control user behavior, while encouraging or mandating smaller families and the the use of fewer resources, energy and carbon dioxide. Acclimating consumers – voluntarily through ubiquitous technologies like the iPhone – to biometrics as a way of life is one small fingerprint forward for mankind, and one giant leap forward for the unfolding ‘brave new world’ that threatens to swallow up what’s left of humanity.

Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton created Truthstream Media.com as an outlet to examine the news, place it in a broader context, uncover the deceptions, pierce through the fabric of illusions, grasp the underlying factors, know the real enemy, unshackle from the system, and begin to imagine the path towards taking back our lives, one step at a time, so that one day we might truly be free…